rccdates (version 1.0.0)

as.Dates: Converting all potential dates in a data.frame

Description

This function takes a data.frame, checks all its variables for potential dates and transform potential date variables to dates.

Usage

as.Dates(x, ...)
"as.Dates"(x, progress_bar = TRUE, ...)
"as.Dates"(x, rtr = TRUE, yyww = rtr, yyyyww = rtr, yyyy0000 = rtr, yyyymm00 = rtr, ask = FALSE, name = "x", ...)

Arguments

x

a data.frame, numeric vector or character vector, possibly with potential date variable(s)

...

arguments passed to exceed_threshold

progress_bar

Should a progress bar be printed to show the progress of the call? TRUE by default.

rtr

Should dates in formats found in RTR be recognised as dates. This controls yyww, yyyyww, yyyy0000, yyyymm00 but each of them can also be set individually. TRUE by default.

yyww, yyyyww

Should entries of the old yyww/yyyyww-formats be recognised as dates? Same as rtr by default.

yyyy0000, yyyymm00

Should entries with unknown month and/or day (set to zero) be accepted as dates? If yes, dates in the form "yyyy0000" will be set to "yyyy0701" and "yyyymm00" to "yyyymm15". Same as rtr by default.

ask, name

arguments passed to exceed_threshold

Value

the given input with potantial date variable(s) converted to date(s) and other variable(s) intact

Slow call

Note that the function call can be very slow for big data sets (each individual cell is checked). You probably only run this function once per dataset and could hopefully live with this drawback :-)

Details

The function only recognise dates in the standard format used in INCA and Rockan, hence ' week number sometimes used for older data). We hope that this older format can be omited in the future since it adds some unclarity if the vector is really a date or not). Dates in other formats (for example as parts of social security numbers, as part of a comment, or as a time stamp) will not be treated as dates.

See Also

as.Date

Examples

# Let's say we have a data.frame with one date column and one column that is almost
# (but not excactly) a date:
test_data <- data.frame(
                 not_date = c("19121212", "1912-12-12", "2014-01-01", "121212"),
                 date     = c(19121212, "1912-12-12", "2014-01-01", "6405"))
as.Dates(test_data) # Only recognizes the "date" column as date

# Inform that the "not_date" column might also be a date candidate if fixed:
as.Dates(test_data, threshold = .5)

# Force the not_date column to date
as.Dates(test_data, threshold = .5, force = TRUE)